The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not necessarily constitute prior art.
In the adaptive bit rate streaming (ABS) of the conventional video contents streaming technology, an encoder encodes and transmits the video contents so as to correspond to the bit rate requested for each service to a streaming server of contents delivery network (CDN). The streaming server prepares a plurality of encoded files with different qualities after encoding each video content at different bit rates in order to distribute the video contents as appropriate to user terminal apparatus and network environments.
The streaming server streams, at fixed time intervals, to the user terminal apparatus, the files of requested bit rates varying according to the variable user environment. For example, a user terminal apparatus can receive and reconstruct a suitable bitstream for a user environment in units of one second, from among a bitstream encoded at 2 Mbps in high-resolution (HD) class, a bitstream encoded at 1 Mbps in standard definition (SD) class, and a bitstream encoded at 0.5 Mbps in low definition (LD) class.
Contents requiring high video quality like virtual reality (VR) content, take up an enormous amount of data, and end up requiring a lot of hardware resources. Resorting to the conventional technology to stream these large amount of contents, when encoding the same contents by different qualities, results in further increased amount of data. This takes a very high-capacity storage space in the streaming server. Therefore, efficient streaming of a large amount of video contents necessitates a method of reducing the amount of data.